You will often need to install some additional packages before you can build the LSST Stack from source.

Official

The latest "factory" platform is currently CentOS 7. You should expect few if any problems on this platform, and bugs are likely to be promptly attended to. See the Linux section below for prerequisites.

New for 11.0: The minimum gcc version required to compile the stack is gcc 4.8. If you using our previous factory platform, RedHat/CentOS 6, and you are unable to upgrade to version 7 (which comes with gcc 4.8 as default) consult the Linux (legacy) section below

Linux (current)

While we cannot support the LSST Stack on arbitrary OSes, we do endeavor to try different platforms and fix bugs on best efforts basis, You can get an idea of what is working for us from https://ls.st/faq

There are a number of prerequisite packages, depending on your Unix/Linux distribution and version, that you may need to install in order to build the LSST Stack from source. If you are building on a VM from a cloud provider such as AWS or Digital Ocean, the VM usually comes with core packages only and quite a few additional packages will be needed. If you have a more fully-featured desktop distribution, you may only need a few "-devel" packages. Unofficial Linux support is on a best-effort basis.

The link below is the Puppet manifest we use to provision various operating systems for trying out builds, so it is guaranteed to be current and tested. The 'Debian' section can be used for "apt-get" distros like Ubuntu; the 'RedHat' section is for "rpm"-based RedHat clones such as CentOS.

Linux (legacy)

The minimum gcc version required to compile the stack is gcc 4.8. This comes as standard in the LSST "factory" platform, Red Hat / CentOS 7. On our previous factory platform, Red Hat / CentOS 6, you will need to use a more current version of gcc that what is available with your system. If you can go to Red Hat 7, we recommend that you do; if you cannot, we recommend that you use a newer gcc version for the stack by using a Sofware Collection (SCL) with a different version of devtoolset. This will enable you to safely use a different version of gcc (4.9) for the stack than that used by your operating system (4.4)

Here is how to do this (after the pre-requisite setup mentioned in the current Linux section but before you attempt to build the stack with newinstall.sh or eups distrib):

# you (or your IT administrator) only need to do this once:
sudo yum install -y https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-java-common/epel-6-x86_64/download/rhscl-rh-java-common-epel-6-x86_64.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/devtoolset-3/epel-6-x86_64/download/rhscl-devtoolset-3-epel-6-x86_64.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y scl-utils
sudo yum install -y devtoolset-3
# you can do this any time you need to work with the stack, or exec it in your bash_profie
scl enable devtoolset-3 bash

OS X

We have tested the stack on Yosemite (10.10). You will need the Xcode command line tools to build from source.

Versions prior to 10.9 have not been tested recently and may not work.

Python

You can use your own 2.7.* Python install or let the stack install anaconda in your local directory.

Additional Science Software

matplotlib and ds9 are used to display debugging from within Python code and to display results in various example iPython notebooks. scipy is also optionally used by some of our code. We do not distribute these directly, but matplotlib and scipy are included with anaconda and are readily available for most other Python distributions. Binary distributions of ds9are readily available from the official site.